Rosemary Griffith wins our weekly travel writing contest with her account of a
break in the bewitching wilderness of the Tatra Mountains, between Slovakia
and Poland.

Your travel writing could earn you £1,000. That's the prize for our Just Back article of the year. The weekly prize is £200 in the currency of your choice from the Post Office.

Here's this week's winner:

There is a raw, magical quality to the Tatra Mountains: a sense of living folklore. The air is almost metallic in its purity, the pastures a brilliant shade of green. Houses nestle on the slopes, their red roofs steep and long to accommodate heavy snow. Wild boar, wolves and brown bears roam the forests.

The hotel we chose was two and a half miles out of town. I stood on my balcony and gazed in awe at the valley and mountain range in front of me. Fog enveloped the higher peaks and a distant ridge of silhouetted conifers bristled against the white vapour like a boar's back. The barking of a dog echoed languidly and smoke wafted up from the chimney of an old-style wooden mountain house.

We took a ski lift up the Gubalówka mountain and wandered along its tourist-focused track lined with food and souvenir vendors. A common ware in this region is oscypek, a dense, salty sheep's cheese compressed into elliptical shapes imprinted with a diamond pattern. We gave in to our tourist brashness and I had my photo taken holding a good-natured, plump little mountain sheep.

We caught the hillside railcar down into Zakopane, a town lined with timber-built restaurants that offer hot mulled beer, open fires and traditional four-man Goral folk bands. Menus include boar, venison and trout, as well as standard Polish comfort food: pierogi (stuffed dumplings) and zurek (sour rye soup). The luxury of the hotel swimming pool that evening felt indulgent against the backdrop of the wilderness and the hardy locals trying – sometimes with good humour, sometimes with unmasked irritation – to scrape a living from tourist footfall.

On our last full day we made a pilgrimage to Morskie Oko, a high-altitude lake named "Eye of the Sea". The rain began to pour so we bought green plastic tourist macs with pointed elfish hoods. Instead of the two-hour hike up the mountain, we opted for a horse-drawn trailer driven by a sturdy, brusque local in traditional Goral attire: cream woollen felt trousers, waistcoat and black felt hat.

The pungent animal scent of dung and sweat enveloped us as the pair of feisty horses pulled us up the track, through tall evergreens. Blueberry bushes carpeted the forest floor, and we passed the occasional precious gleam of yellow marsh marigold. The sound of birdsong and horse hooves and the motion of the cart lulled us.

We walked the final push and emerged at the Eye, a vast mirror of water reflecting the snow drifts and bare rock of the summit behind it. We sat on a boulder and watched translucent baby trout dart through the shallows, and I felt that nowhere could be more bewitching than this place.

Email your entry, in as close to 500 words as possible (with the text in the body of the email itself rather than attached), to justback@telegraph.co.uk by midnight on Wednesday August 7. For full terms and conditions, see telegraph.co.uk/justback